Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Controlling the Way Text Flows

After you’ve converted your eBook to tagged PDF, you may discover that the page elements don’t flow properly, especially when the page is viewed on a smaller screen. For example, a text caption for a graphic might appear above the image rather than below it. In other cases, you might have an image that has a text wrap around it, but you want to have the image appear after the text when it is reflowed. In such cases, you can use the TouchUp Order tool in Acrobat 6 to edit the reflow order of tagged items in the document. The TouchUp Order tool is located on the TouchUp Text Tool pop-up menu. You can select the tool by either choosing it from this pop-up menu or by holding down the Shift key and tapping the T key to cycle through the TouchUp tools until the TouchUp Order tool appears.
To change the reflow order of elements on a tagged PDF page, follow these steps:
  1. Open the eBook file and navigate to the page containing the elements for which you want to change the reflow order.
  2. Choose View➪Navigation Tabs➪Content to open the Content Navigation pane. The Content Navigation pane displays the content structure tree of your eBook document. When you click the Expand button (+) attached to your eBook icon, the pages of your eBook appear on the next level with Expand buttons of their own. Clicking these buttons displays containers that hold the separate elements on the page in the order that they appear in your eBook document. You can then drag the page elements either individually or their whole container to new positions in the structure tree to reorder the page elements.
  3. Drag the desired page element or container to a new position in the page structure tree. As you drag a page element or container, the mouse pointer changes between an International No symbol and a red downward arrow, indicating the positions you can or cannot drop the desired page element when you release the mouse button. A red underscore mouse pointer is displayed to indicate you are moving an element to an upper-level position.
  4. Repeat Step 3 until you’re satisfied with the reordering of the eBook page elements, and then click the Close button to close the Content Navigation pane.
  5. To view your reflow order changes first, choose View➪Reflow or press Ctrl+4 (Ô+4 on Mac). Use the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons to observe how the elements reflow under different page magnifications.

Using Link Properties options

The Link Properties toolbar, like all Properties toolbars in Acrobat 6, pops up when you select an editing tool. This toolbar lets you specify the appearance of a link and what action occurs when you click the link. As you can see each button on the Link Properties toolbar has a pop-up menu button (black triangle) attached for selecting the following options:
  • Color: Click the Color button to choose a color for the link border on the palette that appears.
  • Line Style: Click the Line Style pop-up menu to select No Line, Solid, Dashed, or Underline border style.
  • Line Thickness: Click the Line Thickness pop-up menu (marked by either 1pt, 2pt, or 3pt line sizes in the Link Properties toolbar) and choose a Thin, Medium, or Thick outline border for the link.
  • Highlight Style: The Highlight Style pop-up menu lets you specify a momentary change in appearance for a link when the user clicks it. The effect is displayed until the user releases the mouse button. These options are available for both visible and invisible links. Choose None to have no change in appearance, Invert to invert the colors of the link, Outline to highlight the border on a visible link or to display a thin line around an invisible link, or Inset to create a 3-D button effect.
  • More: Opens the Link Properties dialog box with the Actions tab selected. Choose from the 16 options in the Add an Action drop-down list, which define an action that occurs when the user clicks a link. The Go to Page in the Document option is the default and is used for internal links. The other choices on this list are used to perform a variety of actions when a link is activated, such as opening a file, playing a sound or movie, or running a JavaScript. he majority of the actions are either impractical or not appropriate for eBook use